Archive for April, 2008

Adium 1.2.5 is now available! This is a great bug fix release, correcting problems with Yahoo! Japan and ICQ connectivity, contact list tooltips when using Spaces in 10.5, and certain Jabber authentication setups, among many others. 22 fixes in all. This will likely be the last release in the Adium 1.2 series as we move toward a 1.3 beta; more on what to expect from Adium 1.3 another time. Quack on, my friends. Quack on.

This year, Adium has accepted three student proposals for Google Summer of Code. One will add a valuable new feature, while two relate to automated testing, which will both improve Adium’s reliability and allow us to spend more time working on new features and less time fixing regressions. Why two projects related to testing? Part of it is just that both students were pretty amazing, but there are strategic reasons as well.

Branton’s project will take the relatively conservative path of extending our existing testing infrastructure; this may include creating Mock Objects for much of Adium’s internals. A difficult task, but one that will almost certainly be beneficial. At the same time as extending our test system, Branton will also be documenting our code, which should make it more accessible to new contributors and easier for us to work with.

Contrasting with this, Arcadio intends to take a different approach; creating a brand new testing framework implementing the Behavior Driven Development approach, and applying it to Adium. If successful, it will give us and other Mac software projects an entirely new set of tools to approach testing with, but it is a somewhat riskier project.

For our only non-testing related project this year, Geoffrey plans to create a framework implementing something similar to Apple’s data detectors feature in Leopard. This will do textual analysis of all messages and use that information to provide contextually relevant actions you can do. Even better, the plan is to make this framework usable in other apps, so this functionality should begin showing up all over the place.

We’d like to give a big shout out to Ian Baird from Skorpiostech, Inc. for generously donating licenses for Changes.app to the project. It’s a great application for viewing changes to files and folders. If you write code, you need to check it out.

As of Adium 1.2.4, the Adium binary is signed. This means that our cryptographic signature is embedded in official releases of the application, and that any changes to that bundle will invalidate the signature and thereby alert your system (assuming it is running Mac OS X 10.5 or later) that the integrity of the program is compromised. One of the most obvious advantages of this besides basic security is that you should no longer be prompted to allow new versions to access your keychain items; the security layer can tell with confidence that Adium 1.2.5 is signed by the same folks who signed Adium 1.2.4 and that it should be allowed without question.

If you mess with the Adium binary in any way, you will invalidate the signature, and access to secure resources — specifically keychain items where your passwords are stored — will be disallowed by Mac OS X. Don’t do that.

A prime example (seen in our IRC support channel recently) are the programs such as Monolingual designed to “slim down” Universal Binary (a.k.a. “fat binary”) programs which have both PPC and Intel code. Removing part of the code invalidates the signature. This leads to warning messages.